Spirit Lake, Iowa — A northwest Iowan who served nearly three years in the Trump Administration is heading home.
Spirit Lake farmer Bill Northey resigned as Iowa Ag Secretary in March of 2018 to become Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
(As above) “It’ll be different waking up now every day not thinking about all the things we need to do at USDA,” Northey says. “There’s other folks that’ll work on that. Now I can start thinking about what I might do next.”
Northey helped draft the agency’s rules for implementing the 2018 Farm Bill and he helped set up the payments to farmers impacted by trade disputes and the pandemic.
(As above) “Those were all in addition to the Farm Bill programs and the disaster programs that are there to respond in case of weather problems,” Northey says.
Northey oversaw a division of the USDA with 21-thousand employees, operating out of about three-thousand locations and Northey traveled extensively. He visited USDA offices in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands as well as in 48 of the 50 states — he didn’t make it to Hawaii or Alaska. Northey says he got to see massive cattle ranches, blackberry farms and other types agriculture he wasn’t familiar with before.
(As above) “It was very interesting to realize the breadth of agriculture in this country,” Northey says.
The biggest surprise for Northey was the intensity of internal agency activity to implement and support USDA programs. Northey cites the pandemic relief fund as an example.
As the former state ag secretary exits the USDA, a former Iowa governor is returning. Tom Vilsack served as President Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture for eight years.
(As above) “It’s really nice to have somebody who knows how the place works and probably has had a little bit of time to think about what he might want to do the next time around, if there was a next time around,” Northey says, “so he’ll hit the ground running.”
Northey says he has no idea if his service in the Trump Administration will impact his future prospects.
(As above) “It’s kind of interesting in my time in Washington, D.C., sometimes I almost felt farther from politics than I did when I was secretary of ag in Iowa,” Northey says. “There I need to keep track of it when I was out and around. When I got out and around as Under Secretary of USDA, they just asked me about programs.”
Northey says he paid less attention to politics — and to Twitter — than he had during his 11 year tenure as state agriculture secretary and he had no comment on Trump’s actions on January 6th.
(As above) “I’m probably not the best person to understand either the pieces that happened or the consequences of those,” Northey says. “We’ll see what time brings.”
Northey was in the U.S.D.A’s D.C. office building when rioters breached the U.S. Capitol. He says the building is at the opposite end of the National Mall from the Capitol and he never felt threatened. Northey’s sister and brother-in-law took over his farming operation near Spirit Lake when Northey left for D.C. in 2018. Northey and his wife are moving back to a townhouse in the Des Moines area with a U-Haul this weekend. Northey says he’s not coming back to retire.
(As above) “Not ready to rock on a front porch some place,” Northey says. “Certainly interested in being able to do some other things and we’ll figure those out.”
Northey, who is 61, graduated from Iowa State University with an agri-business degree and earned an MBA from Southwest Minnesota State. Northey served as president of the National Corn Growers Association in the mid-1990s and won his first term as Iowa Secretary of Agriculture in 2006.
